Kennedy: His parents couldn’t read; he created a shrine | Chattanooga Times Free Press (2024)

When he was a child, Eric Smith had a severe stutter. To amuse himself, he would listen to other youngsters talk and pretend to join their conversations.

He would stand or sit quietly to the side while imagining the remarks he might make if only he had better language fluency.

"More than anything else, I felt inadequate," Smith, now 67, explained in an interview. "I felt abnormal."

He said listening to other children talk felt like watching a tennis match but not being allowed to play.

"I would sit on the sidelines, not knowing at the time I was building up critical thinking skills as a result of being quiet," he said. "I was utilizing my eyes, ears and brain to process."

Looking back, his stuttering paid unexpected dividends, he said. While others honed their conversational skills, Smith became an expert listener.

Growing up, Smith lived in a little house on East 10th Street and attended the former Joseph E. Smith Elementary School down the street. He was the eighth of nine children born to his former sharecropper parents, Frank and Lizzie Smith, who had moved to Chattanooga from rural Alabama after World War II.

Neither of his parent could read or write. He saw them flip through a Bible and assumed they were reading it, he said, but realized as he grew older that they could not.

His father worked at the U.S. Pipe factory here and came home with clothes blackened by his work in the plant, while his mother sometime took jobs as a maid to mountain families.

In fifth grade, Smith said he was selected by a local YMCA branch to give remarks at a public event at the Hotel Patten. There were TV cameras, he recalls. What he lacked in fluency he made up for in determination, and he soldiered through the speech.

(READ MORE: Remembering the Patten Hotel.)

As a young man, Smith worked as the head waiter at Signal Mountain Golf and Country Club, where he met a Chattanooga businessman, the late Hugh Huffaker Jr., who was a leader in the insurance and real estate realms.

(READ MORE: Hugh Huffaker lauded for respecting others.)

Huffaker mentored Smith and encouraged him to step outside his comfort zone and try new careers. Under Huffaker's guidance, Smith got his real estate licence and later worked at Pioneer Bank.

But he still felt like something of an outsider, he says. He could tell when white customers and co-workers seemed uncomfortable about his race and his stuttering. So, in his 20s, he decided to join the Navy and see the world.

At one point, he was living in California and slipped into drug use, which eventually became an addiction that cost him his marriage, he says.

"I thought I was just having fun ... but I couldn't stop, and I realized that I was in trouble," he said.

After two years of addiction to drugs, including crack cocaine, Smith prayed for divine intervention. He remembers crying for hours one day.

"When I finished boo-hooing after a couple of hours, it was like a storm had passed," he said. "I began to breathe normally, and that was the turning point. It was like I had been healed."

In his late 30s, Smith earned a Bachelor of Science degree in human development from a Christian college. He lived much of his mid-life in Southern California and even had his own painting company for a time.

But as he grew older and some of his siblings died, Smith felt pulled back to his hometown. Smith moved back to Chattanooga about five years ago after four decades. He lives in Hixson now.

In the 1990s, he purchased a corner lot next to his childhood home in the 700 block of East 10th Street. As a tribute to his hard working parents, he has converted the lot into what he calls a literacy garden. He has formed a nonprofit organization to oversee the mission of the garden. He envisions school children coming to the garden to read and learn.

The lot is 145 feet long by 40 feet wide and fronts 10th and Magnolia streets. On one end, a cluster of tall dogwood trees provides shade to several rows of marble-topped benches. One imagines a teacher standing in front of the benches reading to a class of children.

Throughout the garden are mulch covered flower beds filled with donated annuals and signs that offer Smith's reflections on life and literacy.

One reads:

I promise to read so I can learn

I promise to learn so I can succeed.

I promise to succeed so I can lead.

I promise to lead so I can unite.

He once struck up a conversation with a man at a bank in North Georgia who turned out to be a landscape architect. The man drew up a sketch for Smith's garden, which continues to be his vision for the space.

Smith sees his parents' illiteracy as a metaphor for life's adversities and literacy as the antidote for many of the troubles in society today.

"I've learned that literacy is more than reading, writing, comprehending," he said. "It deals with how we navigate life ... our world view."

Along the way in life, Smith virtually lost his stutter. It only happens occasionally now, he said, when sentences get backed up in his mind.

Amid the sound of songbirds and the rainbow of flowers in his literacy garden on 10th Street, Smith has found peace and tranquility back in his hometown.

He has been offered more $100,000 for the little plot of land that he paid less than $4,000 for in the 1990s.

But he says he is in no mood to sell. Not now, and probably not ever.

Life Stories publishes on Mondays. Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645.